State of play
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan triggered a political storm last week when he sent Chief Secretary V.P. Joy to Gujarat to study the techniques in the Gujarat Chief Minister’s e-governance dashboard system. The UDF criticised the visit, especially in the light of Mr. Vijayan’s and the CPI(M)’s uncompromising political position vis-a-vis BJP-ruled Gujarat. The Kerala Chief Minister and his party have often shown contempt for anyone praising the Gujarat model. In fact, in 2013, the CPI(M) had demanded the expulsion of the then Labour Minister in the Congress-led UDF government, Shibu Baby John, who had visited Gujarat on his way back to Kerala from New Delhi for half a day to learn more about its highly feted skill development programme. Though the Minister later declared that Gujarat’s skill development model was inappropriate for Kerala, the CPI(M) refused to back down on its demand. Earlier, in 2009, when a CPI(M) MP, A. P. Abdullakutty, spoke highly of then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his State, he was expelled from the party. He then joined the Congress and was elected MLA twice, but was ousted from the Congress for the same reason. Mr. Abdullakutty is now the national vice president of the BJP.
Against this backdrop, Mr. Vijayan’s desire to learn governance from a BJP-ruled State took Kerala by surprise. The Opposition parties predictably slammed the CPI(M) for what they called its double standards. While BJP State president K. Surendran remarked that the decision to send the Chief Secretary to study the dashboard system showed that the Chief Minister had realised the merits of the Gujarat model, the CPI(M) State leadership was at pains to defend the decision, particularly in the absence of Mr. Vijayan who is undergoing treatment in Minnesota.
